The No. 1 Petit Bench of the Supreme Court, in a 4-0 decision Oct. 16, rejected the seventh request for retrial from Masaru Okunishi, an 87-year-old man on death row as a result of his conviction in the fatal poisoning of five women in 1961. It is deplorable that the top court's decision came more than 11 years after he filed the request in April 2002.
Okunishi's first trial in 1964 ended in acquittal. At a community meeting on the night of March 28, 1961, in Nabari, Mie Prefecture, 17 women who drank white wine were poisoned. Five of them died, including Okunishi's wife and girlfriend, and 12 fell sick. Okunishi confessed to lacing the wine with a pesticide to put an end to a love triangle, but retracted the confession before being indicted.
In 1964, the Tsu District Court acquitted him because the details of his confession concerning motive, preparations for the crime and the act of carrying it out didn't sound credible. Yet the Nagoya High Court sentenced him to death in 1969 after considering mostly the same evidence used in the first trial. The Supreme Court finalized the sentence in 1972.